When you initially run the command line script, you will be given a URL to paste into your browser. Login using your username/password and you will be given a PIN#. Return to the command line script and enter the PIN#. Your access tokens will then be saved, so that next time you run the command line script you'll be logged straight in.

PIN# are based on usernames, so if you use multiple Twitter usernames with Maisha, you will need to authorise Maisha for each one.

Although Identi.ca also supports OAuth, unfortunately Net::Twitter does not implement it yet for Identi.ca. As soon as it does, Maisha will add support for Identi.ca too.

The Apocalypse Is Nigh

Posted on 9th June 2009

In case you've read this article by Michael Manoochehri and wondered what will happen to all your twitter apps. Rest assured that Maisha should not be affected. At least not by it's own code. If Twitter itself falls over in a heap then we're all doomed. However, I doubt that will happen ;)

Maisha doesn't store anything regarding the tweets themselves and simply requests a result set from the Twitter API. It doesn't care whether a tweet has an id, it just displays the tweet in the order it was passed back.

It should be interesting to see what, if anything breaks next week, the expected date of the twitpocalypse is 15th June 2009, though I suspect that most apps will carry on as if nothing had happened. I think people will more interested in who gets to post the 2,147,483,649th tweet :)

An Introduction To Maisha

Posted on 27th February 2009

On Wednesday 25th February, the Birmingham Perl Mongers held their monthly technical meeting. As it seem like a good opportunity to get some feedback, I presented a short talk explaining some of the background and mechanics of Maisha. You can have a look at the slides for An Introduction To Maisha on the Birmingham.pm website.

The talk was a forerunner to another talk I'm planning, in which I plan to explain how to write applications using a plugin architecture. Maisha is a perfect and fairly simple example of that without getting too complicated. More news on that to come.

Maisha 0.12 Released

Posted on 27th February 2009

The latest version of Maisha has been uploaded to Github and posted to the CPAN. My thanks to Robert Rothenberg, who has supplied a couple of patches, as well as plenty of feature ideas that I'll be looking at over the next few weeks.

The biggest changes in this release are mostly to provide the user with even more configuration options.

You can now elected to use or not use the system pager (if one is availlable) to display the list of messages. If you have a small terminal window, this can be useful to avoid messages scrolling too quickly off the top of the screen. The default now is to use the pager, but can be set to 0 in your configuration file to disable it.

If you change primary service occasionally, there is now a completion option to save you typing. Following the 'use' command you can now hit the key to try and complete the command line. This ability is being planned for username completion with various commands too, which will be available in a future release.

Within the configuration you can now decide how you would like to format the message lines that you see. You can now include the username, message, timestamp and service on each line. More refinement of the timestamp is also planned for a future version.

Lastly while most will likely use Maisha in a standard 80-column terminal window, there is no reason why it couldn't be wider (or smaller). Fixing the column width for wrapping at 80 columns might then be a bit too restrictive. So now you can also specifiy a column width to wrap at. The default will still be 80 columns.

As hinted above, more features are planned, so expect some more releases in the coming weeks. Thanks to all the feedback, it's been very much appreciated.